Brainhack

8 Be More Musical

“I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music . . . I get most joy in life out of music.”

Einstein

If you're a musician, you're in luck. Every time you play, you're giving your brain one of the best workouts it can get. Neuroscientists have shown that musical skill requires a suite of neural processes firing in tandem: perceptual, cognitive, motor, and executive. Making a career as a musician is like being a professional bodybuilder of the mind.

Steven Pinker and others feel that our musical powers – some of them at least – are made possible by using, or recruiting, or co-opting brain systems that have already developed for other purposes. This might go with the fact that there is no single “music centre” in the human brain, but the involvement of a dozen scattered networks.

Playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain's corpus callosum – the bridge between the two hemispheres – allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings.

“Making a career as a musician is like being a professional bodybuilder of the mind.”

So maybe Einstein's love of music was more than just a pleasant distraction from all that hard thinking he did. In actual fact, playing his violin was very much part of his working day. After a few hours thinking, he'd pick up his violin and then the ...